This is a transcript excerpt from a YouTube interview between Danielle LaPorte and Josh Trent (Wellness Force). Danielle contrasts feeling with embodying—arguing feelings arise from the unconscious/subconscious and we should not over-identify with them—and offers the metaphor of emotions as passing clouds while the self is the sky. She describes "the woe" as sorrow mixed with awe at large historical shifts and rising collective awakening, and situates her community work around compassion, holding heartbreak conversations, and addressing polarization and censorship.
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The question has gone from how do you want to feel? To what do you want to embody? Because what I'm clear on now is that feelings really come from the unconscious, from the subconscious. And that's cool. It's part of being human. We want to embrace those feelings. We don't want to over identify with the feelings. We're not our feelings. Your happiness or your sadness or your sorrow cannot take you out of the game of enlightenment. I'm not my misery. I'm not even my good mood that day. I'm a soul having this experience. And these clouds called emotions are. They're coming and they're going, and I'm going to look at them and I'm going to love them, but I'm going to. I'm not going to be the rain cloud. I'm going to be the sky.
Danielle, welcome to Wellness Force.
I'm stoked for this conversation. I have no idea where this is going to go.
It'll go somewhere of service. And you know, it's funny, like you're, you're a woman who speaks with this incredible wisdom. I was sharing before we recorded that back in 2020, John Weinland, I was in a group and it was a community group. And you showed up at 7 in the morning and it was like as soon as you arrived, the energy of the call shifted. And I feel like you're someone that knows how to bring a calmness and a heart center to the storms we all experience as humans. But you yourself, I mean, you've been through so many storms in life. Like fired from a business you co founded and put your own publicity agency. And you never went to university future studies think tank in Washington dc. I mean, you've had multiple heroes, journeys, dark nights of the soul. So it's this perfect frame for the conversation where we find ourselves as humans right now. We were chatting on Instagram and what you said was really profound. I was like, danielle, how are you guiding your community right now? Like, what's really going on in your heart and soul with your community? And you said, I'm suggesting a whole lot of compassion, a big wake up to censorship. If we can come together to respect choices, then maybe more people will wake up to healthier choices. Because. Because, whoa. Because I gotta ask you, like, what's, what's the woe? When you say whoa, what is that really? What is somatically, how do you experience the woe? What is the woe?
The woe is sorrow. The woe is, wow, people are waking up. The woe is like, these are the times, you know, I think, like so many of us have been able to say, like, yeah, you knew something big was coming, or, you know, or you can get out there and say, like, I knew I incarnated for something great or. But like, this, this is really unprecedented. Like, this is nothing like this in human memory. So like, whoa. And the heartbreak, whoa, my God, I'm in the heartbreak conversation with all of my heart centered members and facilitators. It's like we're having the conversation about polarization and how people are dealing with their mother in law and their neighbor and their selves.
And.
It'S a lot of woe.
The woe is real. And I started to feel it way before, I mean, when I was a child actually. I always wondered, like, hey, you adults, like, why do you treat each other so poorly? Like, what's going on here? Like, what, what is this whole anger, vitriol, resentment, contempt. I mean, fill in the blank with all the emotions that we all experience. And ever since I was a kid, it was like, there's gotta be something different than this. There's got to be something else. I mean, it's what sparked my journey to have this podcast where we explore the physical and the emotional intelligence that you talk about in your programs that I think God gave us. And when I say God, Danielle, I don't mean some bearded dude in the sky. You know, this God word gets thrown around a lot. And with your work and everything you've done, has your definition of God, has the gender of God, has the meaning of God shifted for you? And if it has, was it profound? Was it all of a sudden from someone from your stature? Like, how do you even explain God? What does that even mean to you?
